


The Hunt

by AsEveramWills



Category: Original Work
Genre: Dragons, Fantasy, Original Fiction, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-08-11
Updated: 2018-08-11
Packaged: 2019-06-25 20:28:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,851
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15648369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AsEveramWills/pseuds/AsEveramWills
Summary: First work posted, yay! No summary, cause I suck at those. Names are somewhat generic; it's a work in progress, and if I ever make this a little more official, I think the names will change.Comments and constructive criticism would be much appreciated :D





	The Hunt

**Author's Note:**

> First work posted, yay! No summary, cause I suck at those. Names are somewhat generic; it's a work in progress, and if I ever make this a little more official, I think the names will change.  
> Comments and constructive criticism would be much appreciated :D

When things went wrong, Jack reflected, they always did so in the worst possible way.  
"Jack!"  
He was lying on the gorund, his legs pinned, by what he didn't know. He didn't have the strength to raise his head and look.  
"Dammit, where are you?"  
The cloudless sky was whirling overhead, bright spots dancing in his vision. Grey streaks bisected the blue – they might have been smoke, or his sight might have been failing, he couldn't say.  
"Do you see him? Do you see Jack?"  
A black spot appeared above, wheeling in the air. It took him a moment to recognize it as a bird, a crow, circling, waiting. He raised his arm, reaching out for the bird.  
"Over there!"  
The distant voices drew closer, and with them the sound of heavy boots scrambling over rocks, then the sky was blocked out by faces appearing in his field of vision.  
"Jack, are you lright?"  
"He's pinned-"  
"Get that off him!"  
Some of the faces disappeared, others drew closer, full of concern. They seemed vaguely familiar, but for the life of him Jack couldn't put names to them.  
He kept on staring up.  
"Jack, can you hear me?"  
The crow flew one last circle, then veered away, disappearing out sight. Jack's hand dropped limply back to his side, landing in something wet and warm and sticky.  
"Be careful!"  
He heard a grunt and his body was jostled; whatever had pinned him to the ground was being lifted, he assumed. He didn't feel any change. He didn't feel anything. Until his arms were grabbed, and he was hoisted up, and pain exploded through his body. He screamed, and everything went black.

It was market day in the town of Oldtower. That meant people were thronging the streets, the air filled with the cries of humans, the clatter of carts and tools and the bleating of cattle as farmers and villagers came into town from miles away to trade both goods and news. Down there, the din must have been smothering. Up in the highest level of the old citadel tower, all that remained of it was a faint murmur that was easily drowned out by the much louder cacophony of voices from within the council chamber.  
Twelve men, even if they were lords, really shouldn't be able to make that much noise.  
Jack was standing at one of the large, open windows, his back to the room, looking out over the countryside. Oldtower was spread out below him, a curious mix of tall, clean, orderly buildings and narrow, dirty, chaotic streets, but he was more interested in what lay beyond. Just a few miles to the east was the village called Fin's Meadow, or what was left of it. It had never been more than a small collection of houses centered around a small fishing pond with a few outlying farms. Now several had been, if not destroyed, than at least severely damaged. Smoke was still rising from the burnt-out ruin of one of the farms. Further east, more columns of smoke showed where other villages and even towns had been attacked, and with a little effort, Jack could just make out the flicker of a fire near the horizon where something big was still burning.  
Behind him the squabbling continued, throwing around names and accusations and Jack was starting to think that maybe he, too, should start drinking a few glasses of wine before attending these meetings. It might make their studipidity more bearable. His name was dropped a few times, but Jack refused to turn around. He was being rude, he knew, but if he did turn around and found out which one of the arrogant fools was accusing him of burning villages, it would just get him arrested for bashing a councilor's head in with a wine goblet. So instead he kept watching the bruised landscape, listening with contempt as the council meeting slowly but surely devolved into name-calling and childish taunts. They always did; Jack wondered who had ever thought it a wise idea to put a group of people in charge of the fate of a country who would always be looking first and foremost to further their own profits, and maybe discredit each other in the process.  
Someone slammed their hand on the table, making everyone jump, including Jack. Silence descended, and Jack turned around, curious to see who had so effectively silenced the most talkative people in the world.  
"This is getting us nowhere." Councilman Robert Blacksteel was glaring at his fellow councilors, actually managing to make some of them look contrite. Most just continued to stare back defiantly, though. Blacksteel was a relatively young man, and big. He didn't wear the same fine clothes and trim haircuts as the other councilors; his thick tangle of a beard fell down on a brown leather vest that seemed more suited to hunting than official meetings. He hadn't been a councilor all that long, and Jack had thought him to be something of wild card. He was beginning to like the man now. "We can yell at each other all day, it still won't tell us who attacked those villages-"  
"Or what," Jack interjected.  
Blacksteel glanced at him. "Or what. Nor will it in any way help solve the problem. We must find out where the danger is coming from, and why whoever, or whatever, that is is attacking our people."  
"And how do you propose we do that, Councilman?" another councilor, Hawthorne, sneered. "Assemble a merry band of fellows, trek down to the burning villages and ask questions? Or maybe you would like us to take a look at your magic balls, hope they'll show us what happened?"  
"We don't need to assemble anyone," Blacksteel said, ignoring the insult. "We can just send the Council Guard."  
Any protest the councilors might have wanted to voice died on their lips as they all turned to look at Jack. He pushed himself away from the wall he had been half leaning against and assumed a position that, if approached from the right angle, might have been cautiously called 'at attention'. "We are at your disposal, councilors." It was the safest thing to say; better not give them the idea that he was too eager for this task, or they might just decide to put him on guard duty for the rest of the week and send their own personal guards out just to spite him. God, he hated these people.  
When no one said anything, Blacksteel nodded and addressed Jack directly. "Very well then. Captain Dawson, you will take however many men you see fit and leave in the morning to hunt down this threat and eliminate it."  
Jack gave a small, not quite mocking bow. "As you wish, sirs."

Up close, Fin's Meadow looked a lot worse. As it turned out, none of the village's dwellings had gotten away unscathed, all of them showing splintered beams, torn down walls, scorch marks. A thick layer of soot lay over everything, turning a once-colourful village black and grey. The village was also empty, not a soul left where usually children ran around screaming and laughing and adults went about their daily business in good spirits. Those who had survived the mysterious attack had fled to the closest village or to Oldtower itself. Jack had already talked to a few of them, but none had been able to tell him anything useful. It had happened in the night, there had been a screeching sound, like a blade drawn along a stone, and suddenly there had been fires everywhere. People had started to scream, one of the houses had exploded. But no one had been able to tell him what had caused all this.  
No one had mentioned the corpse in the pond either.  
"Look at this," Jack called, gaining the attention of his squad. "It's burnt to a crisp. What does something like this?"  
"I'd guess fire," one of his men said.  
Jack turned sardonic eyes on him. "Really. And here I thought the water had burned him. What I meant is: He can't have flung himself into the pond, not the way he looks. If he'd gotten to the pond in a less burnt state, the water would have doused the flames. It probably wouldn't have saved him, but at least he wouldn't be looking like a block of charcoal right now, and if any of the other villlagers had put him here, surely they would have taken him out afterwards. So how did this happen?"  
"Maybe he was one of the attackers?"  
"No weapons or armour. And there is no other sign of any human attackers. The villagers all ran out when the fires started, they would have noticed if there had been bandits running around or anything like that." Jack moved away from the pond and towards one of the collapsed houses. It had collapsed outwards. How?  
They stayed in Fin's Meadow for most of the day, but moved on before nightfall. They all agreed that they didn't want to sleep in this place. They weren't men who were easily scared, but this was putting a damper on their usual enthusiasm and constant good mood.  
They moved further east, following the trail of burnt-out villages, and found more or less the same everywhere. Empty villages, collapsed houses, the occasional charcoal corpse and never a sign of any attackers. With every day that passed, the squads morals sank lower, their hopes of finding the source of all this destruction slowly disintegrating and the hope that they would not find it rising in its stead. They all kept their weapons close at hand, fearing that at any time, something would come out of nowhere and burn them to crisps like it had in the villages. Jack was usually good at cheering his men up; now he was feeling just as uneasy as they were.  
Finally, after a fortnight spent following the path of destruction, they reached the town Goldwell at the foot of the mountains. Goldwell was a mining town, aptly named for the vast amounts of gold ore pulled out of the mountains here every year, and thus most houses were built of stone instead of wood. It meant that the town seemed mostly intact, except for the black marks and soot that covered everything here just as it had in Fin's Meadow. The town was also just as empty as all the villages. Completely empty, in fact; this unnerved Jack, because he had assumed that, given how many people lived here, it would have been more or less impossible for everyone to get away unscathed, and he had steeled himself for finding quite a few bodies. However, even after a thorough search of the town they found nothing – no corpses, no tracks, no clues whatsoever but the scorch marks that had by now become familiar.  
Jack assembled his squad in the town square. They all looked grim and unhappy, and Jack couldn't blame them. Usually all they had to contend with was breaking up fights between the councilors' respective guard details or the occasional raiders' attacks in the harsh winters; None of them had ever encountered anything like this.  
"We'll stay here for now. I know-" He had to raise his voice to make himself heard over the immediate protests. "I don't like this either, but we've got no choice. We've got a job to do, and if we return to Oldtower before we're done with it, any more attacks, any more deaths, will be on us. So we stay here, at least for a few days, see if we can't find anything after all, or if anymore villages are attacked." Personally, he didn't think that likely to happen. So far all of the attacks had been on those villages that lay on a fairly straight line between Goldwell and Oldtower; even those places that veered just a mile or two away from that line had been spared.  
While his men set up camp in the town square – they refused to sleep in the abandoned houses – Jack wandered through the empty streets, turning it over and over in his head. Goldwell to Oldtower. Why? They had nothing in common, one being a mining town, the other hardly more than a marketplace that was only important because the council met there. But there was nothing of wealth in Oldtower except --  
He stopped dead. The citadel tower the town was named for. It was ancient, believed to be a relic of the times long past when the dragons still roamed the country and humans prayed to them like they were gods, and not the bloddthirsty monsters they were now believed to have been. The tower, the story went, had been part of a huge castle-like structure where the priests of the creatures lived and prepared their offerings to their scaly masters. Some said that the tower itself, the only part of the ancient citadel still standing today, had actually not been built, but had grown straight from the ground, shaped by the dragons' magic. The same thing, Jack knew, was said of a building here in Goldwell, not a tower, but a low, vast, sprawling maze of a building that looked like it had grown right out of the rocky mountainside: the barracks, where both the miners and the guards of Goldwell had their homes and guarded the entrance to the mine. The entrance, which lay inside the building.  
Jack started running, stopped again, took a moment to orient himself in the strange town, then took off again, this time in the direction of the barracks. It lay on one side of a large, open space, where it was forbidden to build or loiter, in case there was an accident and the mine needed to be evacuated quickly, but still peddlers and other vendors put up their stalls every day to sell food and trinkets to the constant stream of workers entering and leaving the barracks at any given time. The stalls were all wrecked now, some of them looking as if they had been flung through the air like toys thrown by a huge child. Jack noticed that one of the huge statues that lined the edges of the square had been flung around in a similar fashion and stopped dead, staring in horror. What could possibly have the strength to move something that big and heavy? A terrible thought came to him, a whispered memory of old tales of sorcerers living in the mountains, searching for ways to gain power, when he saw movement at the entrance to the barracks. His meandering thoughts about powerhungry wizards came to a screeching halt, and he moved cautiously forward again, reaching for his axe.  
A flame came to life in the dark doorway, illuminating – something, and then the flame moved towards him at very high speed. Jack just had time to think that he should have called his men before he was flung backward by a huge blast and landed on his back, staring up at a clear, calm blue sky that was whirling dizzyingly overhead.

He'd been lucky, the squad medic told him when he woke up. He was bruised and had a nasty cut on his thigh from a piece of the wooden stall that had pinned him, but he had not broken any bones and didn't seem to have any internal injuries, which, in this place, would have meant certain death because their medic wasn't a proper healer and didn''t have the necassary tools with him to deal with an injury like that anyway. Jack's leg hurt like hell, and so did his back, but he could move around, even though it earned him angry glares from the medic, and could take up the hunt again in a day or two, they told him.  
Jack wasn't so sure about that, though. He was sitting on the empty plinth of the toppled statue at the edge of the square in front of the barracks, staring at the black circle on the pavement where the flame had hit. He shouldn't have survived that; they had seen in Fin's Meadow and other villages what that flame did to a human body. It had seemed so damned accurate, like the people had been set on fire where they stood; why would it have missed now? He had seen something in the barracks, something alive, and that something had looked at him right before the fireball struck. It couldn't have missed. Not unless it wanted to.  
Now that he thought about it...Jack had hardly had time to react, much less move out of the way, and still the fire had hit not him, but the ground in front of him, throwing him back instead of burning him. It was strange, as if the...the creature had wanted to scare him away, not kill him. But why? It hadn't exactly been shy about killing before, so why now? And why did it seem like it was defending the barracks?  
Jack got up slowly and carefully, grabbing his axe and once more moving cautiously towards the entrance of the barracks. He had no idea what it was, but if the creature was defending the barracks then there had to be something in there, something that it wanted to protect. Its offspring, maybe? Or some kind of hoard?  
He crept along the edge of the square to approach the entrance from the side, maybe not provide that clear a target this time. It occured to Jack that it would have been smarter to get his squad together this time, but if he was wrong, or worse yet, right, he didn't want to put them at risk. If he didn't return, he trusted they'd be smart enought to get their things, break up camp and get out of this ghost town. Well. He hoped, anyway.  
There was no attack this time, no fire rushing at him, no huge eyes watching him from the darkness. He relaxed a little when he left the open space of the square behind and entered the relative shelter of the barracks maze. It might have been a ridiculously stupid thing to do, given that this was a confined space and he would have a lot more trouble running away or swinging his axe, but it would also be much easier to find cover from the fire, and besides, if the creature could toss around that statue like that, then he assumed its size alone would make it a lot more difficult for the creature to move quickly and nimbly in here than it would be for him.  
During training for the Council Guard, Jack, like every other recruit, had been required to learn the layout of every big, significant structure in the country, and that included the barracks. If something were to happen and a rescue became necessary, the Council Guard would be expected to do it without getting lost in the process. He had hated it back then; he was grateful for it now, because it meant he could easily find his way through the maze, even in the darkness, his hand that wasn't holding the axe trailing along the walls and counting steps and available turns. When he sensed the space around him opening up he knew he'd reached the entrance to the actual mine. He felt along the wall on his left until it left rock and found wood. Some more clumsy feeling around got him a torch. He reflected that he should really have thought about that sooner as he fumbled around for a tinderbox or something of the kind. It took him a while, but finally he got the torch burning. That, of course, meant that he was momentarily blinded by the sudden light, but since he had gotten this far without incident, he decided that he had the time to let his eyes adjust to the new lighting.  
When they had, he looked around and discovered something new and unexpected on the relatively soft ground. There were tracks there that didn't seem to belong in a mine. It looked almost like a snake's trail, a winding line in the ground, but it was far too deep to have actually been a snake. He stared at it for a while, his mind unhelpfully providing pictures of spikes and talons. Even if that thing was just defending its lair, it would be able to do so very effectively even without its fire. Jack swallowed down the rising fear that was trying to overwhelm him and started to follow the trail into the mine.  
After a long time that might have been hours, he found the end of the trail. It also seemed to be the end of the mine, a large cavern that had only the one entrance. Something caught his eye at the back wall, and he moved closer, his hand now gripping his axe so tightly that it hurt. When the light from the torch reached the thing near the cavern wall, Jack found himself going cold all over. It was a mound of bones, an entire, perfectly preserved skeleton of a huge creature. It was several meters long, Jack guessed, with a huge, horned skull, long claws, spkes along its backbone and at the end of the long tail, and a set of wings. And suddenly he knew without a doubt what he had only guessed before and had desperately hoped that he was wrong about.  
It seemed the dragons weren't quite as extinct as everyone had thought they were.  
And judging by the low growl that he now heard coming from the entrance to the cavern, the one that had laid waste to Goldwell and all the villages between here and Oldtower was now right behind him.  
Jack closed his eyes, dropping the torch. The hunt, it seemed, was over. He'd found his prey, only the prey turned out to be the most fearsome hunter to ever roam the world. He thought briefly of his men, who were probably busy turning every stone in this damned town to find him, and hoped that they wouldn't blame themselves when they didn't. And now, at the end of his life, was the first time he was glad he didn't have parents, had never taken a wife. At least no one would miss him.  
It was strange, he thought, that the fear that he'd had to fight down with every step he'd taken on his way here was completely absent now. Perhaps even it had decided to abandon him to the fate that he'd brought on himself out of sheer stubbornness, or, if he were being honest, stupidity. Or maybe it had left to give him the chance to face his last fight head on, not cowering in a corner and pleading for his life. Oh well. No reason to disappoint it then, was there. He raised his axe, holding it in both hands, ready for battle.  
Then he took a deep breath, and turned around.


End file.
